FGCT5002 Conscious Practitioner
Dr Digdem Sezen digdem.sezen@uca.ac.uk
“The best that has been thought and said in the world.”
According to Arnold (1869) culture was the antidote to:
Arnold : Culture as refinement, order, perfection.
Seldes : Culture as vitality, humour, experiment, and pleasure.
Mass media expanding: radio, film, magazines.
Industrial modernity now tied to creativity, not moral decline:
The “Roaring Twenties” optimism, jazz culture, consumer society.
Mechanisation of Culture: Reproduction technologies (printing press, photography, cinema, phonograph) make art widely available.
This democratises culture, allowing more people to see and engage with artworks.
But it also erodes the special, ritual status of the original, art becomes commodity, entertainment, or propaganda.
Does reproduction destroy art, or does it make art more democratic?
What might “aura” look like in digital culture?
Can a digital artwork have presence or uniqueness?
Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979)
Taste is not natural, it is socially constructed and linked to class, education, and upbringing.
Our preferences for food, music, art, or design reflect our social position, not just “personal choice.”
Judgements of taste are a form of power, they reinforce social boundaries and hierarchies.
There are no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (1958)
Raymond Williams
Cultural capital refers to the non-financial social assets, like knowledge, skills, education, and cultural tastes, that influence a person’s status and opportunities in society.
Embodied
Objectified
Institutionalised
acquired through socialisation and education, it’s part of one’s habitus.
credentials, degrees, and certifications that formalise embodied knowledge
ownership and appreciation of cultural goods, books, artworks, instruments, tools, etc.
Producer → Intermediary → Consumer
Cultural intermediaries mediate how goods are perceived by others, by framing those goods as culturally legitimate and thereby adding symbolic value to them.
J. S. Maguire, Cultural Intermediaries, 2015
Selection and search
Setting criteria
Legitimising cultural products
Shaping market niches
Influencing creation
Connecting creators and audiences
Traditional vs. digital gatekeepers
They perform a search and selection function, deciding which artists or works will be shown to the public. This is critical in a market where there are more creators than channels for distribution.
Paratexts are the surrounding materials that mediate how we encounter a cultural object: they shape first impressions, guide interpretation, and construct value.
‘Value is not something which the text has or possesses. It is not an attribute of the text; it is rather something that is produced for the text’
Tony Bennett, 1979, ‘Texts, Readers, Reading Formations
’‘Paratextual frames can… prove remarkably important for how they assign value to a text, situating it as a product and/or as a work of art’ Jonathan Gray, 2010, p. 81, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts
“BioShock is an archetypal prestige game: a special class of AAA game that is expected to excel commercially but has distinction from other popular favourites and best sellers by grace of its supposed artistic quality and canonical status.” Felan Parker, 2017, p. 740 parallel prestige cinema
